![]() Technical writers who work with Confluence don’t need any XML skills or knowledge of DITA. Confluence has a rich text editor for pages and blogposts that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever used a word processor. #3 Different User Skill SetsĭITA: All employees involved in the DITA-based content lifecycle need sufficient XML skills and in-depth knowledge of DITA to be productive writers.įurthermore, DITA is often embedded in a content management system or another tool chain that requires configuration and extensive customization in advance.Ĭonfluence: With this enterprise wiki, no specific knowledge or technology skills are needed to create content of any kind. And more and more organizations are now beginning to use Confluence for managing technical documentation. If they have the right permissions, they can edit, comment and share content. ![]() Confluence makes it easy to involve all participants in the content creation and distribution process. They use this platform for many purposes: as an intranet, a knowledge base, or to collaborate with customers and partners. Only technical writers are familiar with this topic complex – DITA maps, publication scripts, DTDs, and so forth.Ĭonfluence: In contrast, most Confluence authors have no technical writing background. So DITA authoring environments are specialist applications for technical communications. That’s why their focus is managing technical documentation with DITA, and not much other use cases. #2 Different User Groups and Application ScopesĭITA: In most cases, DITA content applications are only used by technical writers. The same applies to structured authoring and single-source publishing to multiple output formats. to create pages in multiple languages or to manage multiple versions and variants. All they need to do is start typing.Ĭertain content management features beyond basic content re-use are available only as add-on for Confluence, e.g. That makes it ideal for casual users wanting to create and share content in the wiki. The fact is, people really do go ahead and use it, because it’s so simple and intuitive – and because it’s probably already in place. The only initiative with this goal that I'm aware of is the Lightweight DITA project, which is about reducing the element catalog to a reasonable number of structure items.Ĭonfluence: The main motivation for using this collaboration platform is completely different. Simplicity and ease of use have never been a priority for the DITA environment. #1 Different Priorities and ApproachesĭITA: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture is primarily employed to structure content, re-use it on any level, and publish it. complex tools, let's focus on the use cases, and consider the fundamental differences between DITA's and Confluence's approach. They differ in several ways, so maybe we're comparing apples to oranges. This article, and the really valuable discussion in our blog about structured authoring and DITA, made me think about the contrasting approaches taken by DITA and wiki-based documentation with Atlassian Confluence and the Scroll Content Management add-ons. Collaboration and ease of use are killer features that make an open documentation project work. I will take care of the formalities. Wiki is great for that. A casual user who wants to contribute should be able to just start typing. He writes:Īny unnecessary obstacles such as forced structure (DITA) or formatting conventions (Markdown) stand in the way of getting content written. I recently stumbled across a very interesting blog post by Antti Hietala. But there's also one thing both approaches have in common. This blogpost outlines the different use cases of wiki-based documentation versus XML-enabled structured authoring. ![]() with Atlassian Confluence) and structured XML authoring (usually with DITA) are compared. When it comes to finding an authoring and single-source publishing environment, often Wiki-based documentation (e.g.
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